ActiveCampaign Review

Finding an email service provider that offers robust automation features for a budget-friendly price is usually quite a challenge. The biggest service providers offering a versatile range of email automation features tend to be quite pricey, often to the point that smaller businesses and self-employed marketers are priced out of the service.

However, the importance of email automation cannot be overlooked. It’s a tool that is essential for email marketers looking to make the most of their email lists.

With email automation tools, you can increase the likelihood of converting leads into sales while engaging your subscribers to ensure they remain on your list, doing so with minimal effort after setting up the initial automation.

ActiveCampaign is an email service provider that offers an incredible range of email automation functions that will transform your marketing campaigns and generally make life much easier!

Overview

ActiveCampaign offers a range of email automation services along with an impressive CRM platform, making it a useful tool for marketers looking to take advantage of automation functions to enhance their email marketing campaigns.

The email automation features are some of the most versatile of any email service provider, allowing you to create almost any type of automation you want, from triggered campaigns to sales follow-ups to dynamic email content.

Not only can you create any kind of workflow you wish, ActiveCampaign offers impressive segmentation functions that are perfect for developing focused emails that get the desired responses.

While not the most suitable for beginners, ActiveCampaign offers a range of features that will be beneficial to email marketers seeking high-quality automation functions without paying a small fortune.

Email Automation

ActiveCampaign’s biggest selling point is unquestionably its email automation features. For such a cost-effective price, you’ll struggle to find anywhere near the same level of automation functions from an email service provider.

These automations are relatively easy to set up using the workflow editor, which uses a flowchart interface to create your automations, although some of the advanced features may be too complex for beginner marketers. Anyone with experience in the field will certainly find a lot to like here.

For instance, you can create email automations based on almost any trigger you can think of. These allow you to start automations based on any action, from joining your list to a tag being added. There are more advanced triggers available too, such as being to trigger an automation when a specific page is visited on your site.

Furthermore, ActiveCampaign offers a range of actions that includes sending emails, updating tags, sending SMS and much more. An especially useful action is the ability to split test your various automations to see whether any improvements are required throughout the workflow process

Email Creation

The editor feature on ActiveCampaign allows for a range of emails to be created, including traditional newsletters, autoresponders, SMS, date-based, and RSS triggered. These are all commonly used emails that you can use to create your campaigns and subsequent automation functions.

You can start with a blank template and use the editing tool to personalise the email to your needs. If you like an email you can quickly save it, although the auto-save function is so fast that sometimes undoing your recent actions can be quite irritating – it’s much less annoying than losing all your work of course!

Shared Automations

The idea of creating a custom workflow automation is certainly daunting for many, which is why ActiveCampaign’s shared automations are such a useful feature. Here you can find automations created by other users and there are plenty of workflows created that you may not even need to create one of your own.

Conversely, you can share your own automations with other users! Simply select the share option on the drop-down menu in the automation page and you’re given a URL to share. This is great for smaller sales departments, as you can easily send and integrate our automations to other accounts.

List Management

ActiveCampaign uses tags to help you easily segment and automate your email lists for better list management. This is an ideal feature for creating highly targeted email campaigns across your different subscribers, increasing the chances of successful opens, click-throughs, and conversions.

By creating different lists based on the actions of your customers, you can create automated emails with unique and conditional content. For example, you can use tags to swap out images with text based on the tags you’ve created.

Has someone visited a product page on your site? Maybe they’ve filled out a form for a free offer. You can create tags and subsequent automations for virtually any action, allowing for efficient list management that gets the desired results.

Reports and Analysis

ActiveCampaign offers in-depth reporting and analysis to help better understand how your campaigns are performing. This includes reports on opens/reads, click-throughs, pages visited, and a complete summary of each campaign sent (e.g. time sent, number of recipients, campaign type etc.)

A cool feature is the ‘hourly open trend’, which provides you with a flow chart depicting the time that subscribers open your emails. This is great for helping establish the optimal times to send campaigns based on when users open your campaigns.

There are also reports on your completed automations. This lets you view how many people interacted with the automation, the number of users that completed automations, and track any automation goals you’ve set.

Pricing

ActiveCampign has very flexible and reasonable pricing options which we think are a steal for the amount of functionality you receive. The pricing varies depending on what functionality you need as well as the size of email lists you may have.

It’s worth mentioning that unlimited emailing is included in all plans as well as email automation. This is not the case with other email services we’ve reviewed in the past which is a massive plus for ActiveCampaign. They also offer free migration if you’re thinking of switching to the platform making the whole transition painless.

Conclusion

ActiveCampaign is an impressive service that gives an email marketer everything they need to create successful campaigns. The email creation and automation features are the obvious selling points, giving access to a range of automated functions that make life much easier for smaller businesses and entrepreneurs.

While learning the ins and outs of the automated features does take some getting used to, when you do get a better understanding of the process and how to use its segmentation function to your advantage, you’ll find it becomes an invaluable asset for planning and managing your email campaigns.

Best of all, ActiveCampaign offers this service for one of the lowest price points around, while it’s also scalable to suit the needs of your business, so you don’t need to over-invest initially.